Air Force One, Part Two (1)
Michael Goulish

It takes him a while to realize where he is. For the first few minutes after waking up, some deep part of Jack's mind assumes that he's in heaven, and it’s only after many minutes of blurry thought that the rumpled covers and a corner of the pillow come into focus. Only then does Jack begin to understand that the blissful state he is reluctantly emerging from is nothing but a physical place, and still very much on the mortal plane. Nothing more than a bed.

Jack has no doubt that he spent every night of his childhood in a bed. But by now he’s been on the road for fifteen years. Riding the rails at first, and then, when the trains were winding down, finding his way into the world of the big rig drivers and their roadside camps. It’s been a long time, and it’s left him no memories of nights when he wasn't sleeping in a bedroll on the ground, most likely under a tent made from a cargo tarp.

By the standards of his childhood, the bed Jack is waking up in would have seemed hard — the blankets heavy and itchy with raw wool. Here and now, waking up in this bed is one of the finest experiences that Jack Arnet is capable of enjoying. It's so good that he would like to try it again. Say, perhaps, an hour from now. And maybe one more time an hour or so after that.

But there is a region of the spirit that’s much deeper than Jack’s fuzzy desire for a few more hours of sleep — and at this point it reminds him with perfect clarity why exactly it is that he finds himself here, now. Then the thick covers, gray with the early light of an overcast day, come into sharp focus an instant before he pushes them away and sits up blinking. The bed means that he's at the Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge, and that means this is the day he’s awaited for a long time indeed. It's not a day for sleeping late.

He gets out of bed and crosses to the room's only other furniture: a small round table and two chairs that don’t quite match it, situated by the slowly brightening window. One of the chairs holds the single bag he packs when he has any reason to pack anything.

Normally all his immediately useful possessions are sitting within easy reach on the passenger seat while he drives, and the rest of his worldly goods occupy two-thirds of a big trunk that’s tied down on the front of the van.

On top of the canvas bag is his gun, sitting where he left it after the excitement of last night. He picks it up slowly, thinking about the barking dogs and the woods. What was scaring them? Nobody knew. And if that isn’t disturbing enough, there was another fact that perhaps only Jack noted: nobody expected to know what was out there. Is that how it is now? Everybody just accepting that there are mysteries in the world now, maybe dangerous ones, that will always remain mysteries? Like it’s not our planet anymore.

Are we beaten?

This is not what he wanted for today: mysteries and unusual goings on. He wants the Wolverine to be the place it’s always been, and its owners to be the people he’s always known. He wants that now more than ever.

Looking out of the window that he left uncurtained during the night, he sees cornstalks rattling in the old garden. Beyond its eastern edge, the pines are tossing in the same wind.

OK! Like it or not — ideal or not — this is the day he has. And it's the only day he's ever likely to get.

He sets the gun aside quickly, then takes out of the bag a heavy cloth roll containing several more weapons which he lays aside carefully on the table. Then he sees the shirt, and sinkingly realizes the fool's mistake he has made. Packed under the heavy gun roll, the precious shirt has wrinkled badly.

He takes it gently by the shoulders and carries it like a wounded friend to the bed. He straightens it out on the bed, spreading it arms a little and trying to make it well again by the laying on of hands, and the application of faith and the hope of the desperate. And behold, the fabric smoothes under his hand, and is wearable. It was Permanent Press.

It's not the greatest shirt in the world. It's plaid like most of his shirts, and has a simple pattern of faded blue on white that he’s always felt good about somehow. It has a kind of elegance to it, in a small way. Has he been unconsciously saving it for this day? If not, then only divine intervention can explain the fact that this shirt alone in his limited wardrobe still possesses all its buttons and has no visible oil stains.

The fact that the shirt happens to be clean right now is no miracle or accident, however. He has kept it in that unnatural state for several months and many thousands of miles, just to avoid the possibility that on this morning he would otherwise be forced to wait in line for a washer and dryer. As it has turned out, that wouldn’t have been a problem. There aren’t enough customers at the Wolverine to make a decent line, and not many of them will be up this early anyway. Jack is nevertheless pleased with himself for carrying out his plan so well thus far.

As he turns back toward the table he glances into the old mirror, framed in cracked wood, hanging on the wall. Aged though it may be, the mirror is still clear enough to show him an image that’s quite a bit less flattering than he would like. Maybe a week ago you could have said that his hair needed a wash. Now — well, he definitely does not want to go to his talk with the owner of the Wolverine looking like any damned trucker fresh off the road and a stranger to soap.

Jack assesses his situation quickly. It's still early enough, and the customers few enough, so that there won't be a line at the showers. Yet it's late enough that Mick will already have lit the fires under the bathroom's big tank. With a little luck, the shower water might even be starting to get a little bit warm.

Decision made, he throws on yesterday's clothes, picks up the clean ones carefully, and hurries out of the room. He wastes no thought on the valuables he's leaving behind in the unlocked room. The doors on guest rooms at the Wolverine latch firmly, but they don’t have any locks on them. There aren't many truckers alive who would steal from one of their own even in the loneliest roadside camp. There's not a one of them who would think of doing it here.

In any case, there’s nothing in the room that he's leaving behind that is half as important to Jack Arnet this morning as having clean hair.




 —————————————————————————————
Silence
—————————————————————————————

Jack enters the dining room as though it were a church, or perhaps a courtroom — then stands in the wide entryway looking around like a fool. Mick isn't here. Mick is always here in the mornings. He gets coffee for the men, sometimes makes pancakes if there's milk, and chats a little. But today, naturally, he’s not here.

Jack takes a few steps into the room just to try to look like he has some faint idea of what he’s doing. One of the several truckers present has already given him a look, no doubt wondering what his problem might be. Then Jack notices that the proprietor has left several black metal coffee pots standing in front of the fire to keep warm, and he makes his way toward them gratefully. Taking a mug and using one of a stack of ancient hot pads to pick up a pot, Jack turns around to see that the same trucker is looking his way again. The man gestures, inviting Jack to sit with him.

It seems like as good an idea as any. And maybe the guy knows where Mick might be.

"Hey," the trucker says by way of greeting as Jack takes a seat.
"Hey man, are you Jack Arnet?"

Jack starts to fill his mug, and then looks at the man. He an older guy, blond and gray hair with a face that's seen a lot of weather.

"Yeah, that's me," Jack replies easily.

The man nods and takes a swallow of his own coffee before speaking again in a lowered voice.

"Listen," he says, "I heard you were interested in some tires?"

Jack takes a deliberate drink from his own mug in a vain attempt to hide just how interested he is. The tires are the worst part of his rig as anybody can see who bothers to look, with practically all of them dangerously low on tread and a few probably ready to give up and blow apart within the next thousand miles. And that’s if he’s lucky. There would be no better way to increase the rig’s resale value than to replace as many of the tires as possible. He’s delayed it too long, and the price only gets higher when people see how many you need.

"Yeah," Jack says, "You looked at my rig?" One can always hope.

"Yeah. You're the red Kenworth, right?" the man asks, and Jack nods grimly. "That's a nice rig," he adds. "Yeah, I got what you need."

"How many though?" Jack asks perhaps too quickly. But then — there's no point in being cagey now. The man has seen the rig and knows exactly how badly Jack needs the tires. The only thing he doesn't already know is why they’re needed. He'll be assuming that Jack wants to improve them because he's planning to keep driving through the winter.

A man who wanted to get better traction through the snow might be interested in no more than a couple good tires to put up front. Jack wouldn't be. Strangely, though, the older trucker seems reluctant to answer his question.

"How many you need?" the man asks back instead.
"You saw it," Jack replies a little irritated, not wanting to play games especially if they're going to be simpleminded. "I expect I need more than you got. So — how many you got?"

The man frowns and drinks again, considering. Even going so far as to glance once at the nearest other customer as if to judge how far to lower his voice. Jack is quietly alarmed. What's the big secret? We're talking about tires, right?

"I got —" the man hesitates again, judging how safe it is to say what he wants to. "I got eighteen good ones to sell."

Jack lowers his mug slowly, looking back at the man. "Eighteen?"

That’s crazy. Is he stripping his whole rig? That wouldn't make sense even if his engine had blown up just as he coasted in to the Wolverine's lot. He could still do better selling the cab without an engine, and you sure couldn’t ask for a better spot than the Wolverine to look for buyers for something like that. But it still wouldn’t make any damn sense to strip the tires first.

Has he been collecting tires? Saving up enough so that he can sell a whole set to some poor sucker who happens to desperately need exactly that? Of course, that doesn't really make sense either.

The older man mistakes Jack's confusion for something else.

"Look," he says quickly, lowering his voice further still. "You ask anybody in here. I ain't crazy, and there ain’t no man that can say I’m a thief."

"Hey," Jack says, spreading his hands, inadvertently imitating the man's conspiratorial tone, "I haven't heard anything. I just don't get it. You selling every tire you got?"

The man looks at Jack, his gray eyes penetrating, bloodshot with smoking and late nights. At last accepting whatever he sees in the younger man's face, the trucker blows out his breath and occupies himself with opening the pouch where he keeps his tobacco and hand-rolled cigarettes. Only after he uses his metal lighter and exhales a deep breath of smoke does he look up again.

"I go to this one town in North Dakota every year for the corn crop," he begins, and hits the cigarette again. "I been going for, I don't know, seven eight years I guess. I wasn't making nothing off of it the last few years. Shit, it was only one load a year and that wasn't full. But they were always happy to see me come. I brought them stuff. I brought more than I had to for that corn, damned if I didn't!" He looks up pointedly.

"It was OK,” he says, “You know? We used to have a good time. I'd stay a couple of weeks, give 'em the news. They told me their news. They woulda told me anything — like if they were in trouble or anything like that."

He takes a while to tap the ash off his cigarette.

"I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw the fields. They didn’t have the corn in. There’s no way they would be late with something like that. They only had the one harvester, but — those folks knew how to keep that pile of junk running. Hell, if they had to they woulda taken that corn in by hand. But it was just standing there in the fields."

He stops again to take a long drag off his cigarette.

"There was a rig, too, parked right in the middle of the street. It was this old fuel hauler I'd seen around once maybe. They only had a few cars, and those were all still parked. Nothing broken. No sign of any trouble. Anyway they never had gangs around there or nothing like that; there wasn’t enough people in those parts for the gangs to bother with.

"I went walking around, going into the houses. The doors were unlocked, so I just walked in. Man. I was nervous to go in the first one, you know. But — nothing there. Some of the tables, there was still food on them." He shakes his head and looks at the glowing end of the cigarette.

"I stayed there for two days, poking around. You know, maybe somebody would show up. I mean, they left their damn food stocks! They didn’t have that much, but man every bit of it was still there in the basements or wherever. How in the hell could they leave their food? They left every tool, they left the water.

"There wasn't a single damn track in the fields around that town. Not one sign. Nothing.”

The man looks at him, frowning, then back at the ashtray.

"I needed some way to pay for the haul, you know? And I didn’t want to — take stuff out of the houses. I didn’t want to go back in ‘em, you know. So I jacked up that rig and stripped it for everything I could get. That driver ain't coming back. None of them people are.

"You know, I was getting spooked there. It was so damned quiet I was starting to get jumpy. Like — you know, you feel like you’re being watched?

“It felt like the damn sky was watching me," he says finally. "I wasn’t gonna stay there another day."

The old trucker stubs out his cigarette carefully, taking longer than he needs for the job, then looks up again at Jack, his eyes cautious.

"I know your rig needs the tires,” he says, “I seen it. That's not the best negotiating position to be in, kid, and we both know it. So I’m gonna tell you something to even the score. Whatever price I can get, I am selling those tires today and then I'm out of here. You hear me? Whatever price I get, I’m on the road by noon.

"Cause that feeling I had in that town? Like somebody's watching?”

He reaches again for his tobacco pouch, surreptitiously glancing across the room to make sure the other customers are occupied with their own concerns.

“It's here now," he says, almost inaudibly. "Whatever it was around that town — I think it's here."





 —————————————————————————————
The Tower
—————————————————————————————

Jack has always thought of the Wolverine as a two-story place, with the second floor being more or less off limits to customers. But there is actually one more floor, if you can call it that: a single room that juts up one level above the rest, and which is variously referred to as Mick's study or, sometimes, the “tower”. It's in the back, and thus not very easy to see from the parking lot. But Jack remembers Mick telling him once that, when the leaves are off the trees, he can see a couple miles in every direction from up there. That’s why he built it. And — just to have someplace to go sometimes, Jack imagines.

He's coming up here now because the consensus among the breakfast crowd was that this is probably the place to look right now if you want to find the Proprietor. Which Jack doesn’t, exactly. But there’s no point in thinking about turning back, because he knows he won’t.

As he reaches the second floor he glances down the hallway and thinks about the one other time in his life that he came this far up the Wolverine's stairs. It's not the best way to settle his nerves, but he shortly does manage to continue up, and into the unknown.

The stairs that continue up from the second floor are inexpertly done and Jack watches his step as he climbs the several short flights. There's activity up above. He hears books being stacked, a chair bumped. The walls around the last half-flight are close, paradoxically like what you might get when descending into a basement.
When Jack emerges it's just at a moment when the clouds, starting to break up, have chanced to allow a little sunlight through. It takes him a moment of blinking to find the bright room's occupant, and to realize that it's not the one he was looking for.

"Oh. Annie! Hi," he says distractedly.

And then, no matter how grave his errand, he can't help looking around him. The entire room is full of books.

It's not a very big place: little more than four yards across and made to seem smaller by the ceiling-high shelves on every wall. At first Jack feels like the room is round, but he quickly realizes that he's only seeing an unusual number of flat walls. Five. The room is five-sided; with tall narrow plexiglass windows on each wall, clearly homemade, and in each corner between the windows, helping to increase the impression of roundness, are the big bookshelves.

There had probably been a library in Franklin when Jack was young. Certainly there must have been a great one in Milwaukee, except that he'd hardly ever gotten up there. Anyway, he'd never cared about such things as a boy. Then the Wars were getting started, and since then — the world hasn't been a very kind place to things like books.

But here — he looks at their closely arrayed spines, in all colors, gaudily printed paper and old blue-gray cloth side by side. Books on every subject, in every size, type, and style. Books rescued over the course of a lifetime from the hard world, and every one of them a doorway into another time, or place — or a whole universe in itself.

Jack remembers hearing that a thousand years ago a king might have possessed no more than half a shelf full of books. A bible, copied manually by a monk over a year or two, was worth half a dozen good suits of armor. Now, things are going that way again. He owns more than a dozen books himself, but he's pretty odd that way. They're his most prized possessions, and not something that he mentions to other truckers.

Copyright � 2000 Michael Goulish
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"